Mansfield Park: Initial Reaction

The other day I bought a new Oxford edition of Mansfield Park, which is the only novel I haven't read. It's clean and soft and full of footnotes. I am delighted with it! It's pretty shocking, actually. The characters make every one in PP seem virtuous. With the exception of Fanny and Edmund, the others are beautiful, witty, morally bankrupt flirts. There's a pun that could be about sodomy in the Navy, which almost blows my mind.* As the book goes on it is settling down a bit. Characters must fall in love and temper their callowness, I suppose.

There are two brother/sister pairs that remind me of my relationship with my sister, Jessie. Austen really holds the brother/sister relationship in high esteem: "even the conjugal tie is beneath the fraternal. Children of the same family, the same blood, with the same first associations and habits, have some means of enjoyment in their power, which no subsequent connections can supply" (183). The mischievous plotting of the Crawfords (which has begun to remind me of Dangerous Liaisons) and the pure joy of the reunited William and Fanny Price both remind me of being with my sister.

I'm interested in the POV of MP. We mostly are privy only to what Fanny sees, and for much of the book she is a very passive observer. We see only what passes her by (like the great scene in "the wilderness" at Sotherton), which gives us a critical distance from the characters, allowing us to recognize their vanity and indiscretions, which might be harder if the heroine of the novel was, say, Miss Crawford.



*The footnote in my edition explains that that is likely not what Miss Crawford is insinuating, due to Edmund's reaction. However, he is invested in seeing the best in her, and I would not be surprised if she was conscious of all meanings in her double (triple?) entendre. She's a smart, worldly cookie.